CAPITOL IDEAS: More Nukes!
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL More Nukes! THE FIRST COMMERCIAL NUCLEAR-POWER reactor, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was built 50 years ago. A coal-powered plant had been planned, but the...
...Protons that were bound tightly together in the original configuration of the nucleus spring apart...
...Against all odds, more and more public figures are calling for its revival...
...Nuclear energy, set back for a generation by the deliberate arousal of unjustified fears, is appropriate to our current state of technological development...
...This puts nuclear power at the mercy of demagogues...
...and the reluctance of policymakers to keep sending billions to Saudi Arabia...
...Around the world, about Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of our dependence on coal...
...As though the public has a clue about the design of nuclear reactors...
...Fortunately they didn't show up until the late 1960s...
...What has Green anti-nuclear activism achieved since the seventies...
...There are several reasons, among them the rising price of oil and natural gas...
...It is in an expansionary phase elsewhere in the world, notably China...
...That is why the conversion of some green leaders is important...
...Hundreds more plants had been envisioned...
...That releases a lot of energy in a very short time...
...Within ten years, 99 percent of all radioactivity disappears...
...As my dear wife asks: would you rather sit on a bucket of firecrackers if half will go off in the next hour...
...Or a bucket in which half will go off in the next 10,000 years...
...Peter Huber and Mark Mills asked this year in City Journal...
...Loony-bin activists took to the streets...
...But most importantly, we have seen a replay of the environmental concern that launched nuclear power in 1954...
...But let us not second-guess the ins and outs of green phobias and fashions...
...At about the same time—in 1954—the chair-man of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss, said in a well-publicized speech that atomic energy would make electricity "too cheap to meter...
...Atoms for peace, atoms for war...
...Environmentalists, once united in their opposition to all things nuclear, are today increasingly on its side...
...that releases a couple more neutrons, which in turn strikes further nuclei, and so on, in a chain reaction...
...Anyway, there is life after Chernobyl...
...On such arcane topics, the public will buy whatever it is told...
...It's not for us to reason why...
...Although they have abused their own power in many ways, they still have the ability to change minds...
...Today 83 ships are equipped with 105 reactors, and there have been no accidents...
...No one in America has died as a result of nuclear power, but as my old friend Petr Beckmann argued years ago in The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of our dependence on coal...
...Such as the Rockies (where cancer rates are lower than else-where...
...Nader, who had said that a pound of plutonium could cause 8 billion cancers, refused the offer...
...That creates steam, which drives a turbine, which generates something useful called electricity...
...But now that it was real, it was itself transformed from the most desired to the most dreaded thing in the world...
...Early in the 20th century, this theory was, weirdly, turned inside out...
...But no new facilities not already ordered by 1979 have been constructed...
...Then came the 1986 disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine...
...These warships are welcomed at 150 foreign ports without panic or Jane-Fonda-style histrionics...
...It isn't...
...Nuclear power puts to good use qualities of matter that have existed all along but distinguish between nuclear power and nuclear weapons...
...President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech came at the same time...
...Instead of exploding it merely fizzles...
...U-235 in contrast is more volatile, and scientists figured out that if they were able to separate out just that kind, until it was over 90 per-cent "enriched," and a critical mass of it was brought together, it would explode...
...Dick Gregory pledged at a demonstration that he would eat no solid food until all nuclear plants in the U.S...
...On the issue of nuclear power the people will believe pretty much what they are told...
...At a low rate they are harmless—may even be beneficial...
...But only for a short time...
...It is on its way to becoming a tourist attraction...
...The most difficult part of the whole process was the separation of the two isotopes of uranium, which (fortunately) is something that could only be done by technologically advanced societies...
...100 new nuclear power stations are on the books...
...Bang...
...Alchemists, Isaac Newton among them, had another idea, and believed that elements could be transmuted...
...Heat is generated, and if this heating element is immersed in water, the water boils...
...We should build another hundred...
...A small number of scientists who should have known better were primarily responsible...
...Atoms for pace, atones for war...
...the realization that windmills and solar are unable to provide anything more than piddle-power...
...Of their ownvolition they transformed into other elements, which in turn broke down into still others...
...Not the reduction in demand for energy that it had hoped for, but a massive increase in the use of coal, which burns less clean than uranium...
...Transmutation lived...
...Radioactivity spread in the immediate area, and there were reports of thyroid cancer...
...I never thought anything good would come of global warming, but it now looks as though it has...
...In fact, it is an essential gas, without which plants would not grow...
...Natural background radiation subjects us all to that anyway...
...Who knows`' SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 CAPITOL IDEAS were only discovered a hundred years ago...
...Their dream was that "base" metals, lead in particular, could be turned into gold...
...But there was an iodine deficiency in the area, and that is a risk factor for thyroid cancer...
...TUCLEAR POWER always had one great vulnerability...
...When one neutron is expelled from the uranium nucleus, it strikes the nucleus of an adjacent atom, and splits that atom, converting it into other elements...
...So, like a flock of birds veering in mid-flight, enviro-leaders turned pro-nuke almost overnight...
...Yet the long half-life of radioactive material is usually cited as damning testimony...
...Scientists found that some elements—particularly the heaviest—were not fixed after all...
...But the most important reason for the lack of political cooperation in Nevada is the decades of misinformation to which we have all been subjected...
...A Wall Street Journal headline (May 2001) strikes me as typically misleading: "Nuclear Power: Revival or Relapse...
...A nuclear reactor is a big kettle...
...It is emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels, but not by the fission of uranium...
...I believe there have been no confirmed deaths outside the plant itself...
...So we thank the environmentalists—notably Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Gaia theorist James Lovelock, and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore—who have accepted this claim...
...Energy is released...
...But with a much less enriched blend, down to only 3.5 percent instead of 90, the chain reaction still occurs but more slowly...
...Even a New York Times editorial recently saw the need to keep "much-feared" nuclear power as "part of the nation's energy mix...
...Its name was radioactivity...
...And heat didn't need to be added—it was emitted...
...Navy...
...Industry Argues New Designs Would Be Safer, Cost Less: But Will Public Buy That...
...Many people find it difficult to distinguish between nuclear power and nuclear weapons...
...The press disguises the point, imputing to "the public" a power that is in fact in its own hands...
...And now nuclear power is set to rise again...
...The President ought to campaign to have this "no safe level" rule changed...
...The generic similarity is real enough...
...in the U.S., three more are planned, of much improved design...
...Uranium is one of the mutable elements...
...Senator John McCain of Arizona sees merit in a nuclear restoration, and that trusty weathervane can for sure see which way the winds of fashionable opinion are blowing...
...It is important, because the expansion of nuclear power will depend on the creation of a spent-fuel depository that is politically acceptable../ Tom Bethel) is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...A coal-powered plant had been planned, but the prospect of more air pollution was not welcome—the Pittsburgh area had had enough of that...
...Plutonium: 24,000 years...
...For this we have "global warming" to thank—a scare that the greens themselves created...
...I think the New York Times has to date failed to inform its readers of one crucial point: radioactive elements with a short half-life are dangerous and those with a long half-life are not...
...HY MUCH-FEARED...
...His apparent unwillingness to do so no doubt explains why Nevada politicians are unwilling to play host to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository...
...In the body, a gas called tritium (a variant of hydrogen) has a half-life measured in days...
...There ensued the rise, and then the unanticipated fall of nuclear power...
...Who knows...
...To be sure, collecting spent nuclear fuel in one place does increase the relative hazard...
...It comes in two main varieties, or isotopes, designated U-235 and U-238...
...policy of putting all spent fuel in one place...
...The alchemists and sorcerers had been on to something—they just got it all back to front...
...Over 99 percent is of the latter, lane people find it dit.f 'cult to quiescent kind...
...No one was hurt, but for the anti-nukes, who had been opposing nuclear 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 power with every trick in the book, it was a dream come true...
...Unfortunately, government policy decrees that there is no safe level of radiation, and in so doing it created a rationale for the anti-nukes to oppose any and all man-made radiation, even when it is lower than found naturally in places where uranium is abundant...
...But most of this material has been cooling off for so long—it has been kept at the power plants where it was created—that it is scarcely dangerous at all...
...Uranium-235, for example, has a half-life of 700 million years...
...Meanwhile, nuclear power expanded without interruption in the U.S...
...CAPITOL IDEAS T O M B E T H E L L More Nukes...
...The philosopher's stone, the missing ingredient sought for many centuries, had been discovered...
...Both split atoms, both are radioactive...
...Maybe some of the green leaders could pay them a visit...
...So the utility, Duquesne Light, switched to nuclear...
...The Geiger counter is firing rap-idly...
...Its background level of radioactivity is now lower than that emitted by the granite of Grand Central Station...
...It turns out that lead was not the initiating element but, in most cases, the end product...
...Later, Cohen offered to eat plutonium on camera if the TV people would publicize it, but they weren't interested...
...Only then did the media and Hollywood get into the act and concoct their China-Syndrome scenarios (a core meltdown causes a reactor to sink through the ground...
...What is nuclear power and how does it work...
...So stay away from tritium...
...electricity...
...Its internal element, consisting of uranium rods, heats up and boils water...
...Some years back they decided that carbon dioxide is a bad thing...
...And that's all there is to it...
...In 1979, an accident at Three Mile Island halted its further expansion...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 Bernard Cohen, a retired professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, offered to eat some plutonium if Ralph Nader would eat the same amount of caffeine...
...Scientists long regarded the elements as stable...
...The key variable is the rate at which radiating particles strike the body...
...and that is a valid argument against the U.S...
...Accept the greens' support, seize the moment, and build the nukes before some new craze erupts...
...The point is that greens have the politicians' ears, they have decided that when carbon dioxide rises into the upper atmosphere it is a "greenhouse gas" and hazT O M B E T H E L L ardous to the planet...
...A Soviet reactor exploded and 31 people died...
...Anything other than nuclear energy causes too much pollution...
...Yes, plutonium is dangerous, because you can make a bomb out of it, but its long half-life ensures that its radioactivity is not toxic for humans...
...On nuclear submarines, sailors work and sleep with their bunks only feet away from shielded reactors...
...As for Three Mile Island, there was a small release of radioactivity, which was possibly even beneficial to its surroundings...
...were shut down...
...This brings us to the half-life of radioactivity...
...Today, 104 nuclear power plants are functioning in the U.S., providing 20 percent of U.S...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
